


The Kids Are Alright

by anirondack



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, No Incest, Non-Linear Narrative, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-04-25 14:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4964935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anirondack/pseuds/anirondack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>50 2-sentence ficlets about moments between the Gansey siblings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kids Are Alright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prizefights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prizefights/gifts).



> Written for the Raven Cycle Ship Swap. Prompt was for Helen and Gansey's excellent sibling relationship.
> 
> Both Helen and Gansey are pan and I will fight anyone on this.

1.

Gansey remembers being seven years old, dressed in a nicer suit than any seven-year-old should have, clinging to the hand of his older sister as she led him down the stairs to a large group of people holding glasses of things he can’t have and saying things that he’s too young to understand.

She never let him go, though, and returned his squeezes every time his fingers tightened around hers.

*

2.

When he was fourteen years old, Gansey kissed a girl from a nearby public school in England and called Helen at one in the morning, practically vibrating through her speaker with excitement.

She smiled as she piled her notes into a binder and asked who the girl was, where she was from, and when Helen got to meet her to threaten her life if she hurt her little brother in any way.

*

3.

Helen breaks her leg in the winter of 2010, when Gansey is just finishing up with rowing for the season and the muscles in his thighs are harder than the wooden floors Gansey II and Mrs. Gansey II have just had installed.

Gansey gives her piggyback rides up and down the stairs every day and she lets him because she cannot tolerate the idea of staying in bed twenty-four/seven, and also because Gansey is quite the noble steed.

*

4.

She’s in the middle of a lecture when her phone buzzes with a text:  _'dad broke one of mom’s glassware plates and I think the house is going to explode soon, can I move in under your bed?'_

Helen laughs and keeps doodling on her notes, but she imagines up a little bed nook with her extra pillows and a huge down comforter anyway, just in case.

*

5.

She has been dumped only once in her life, and it was by the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen, she tells him through quiet sniffles, perfect and radiant and a Ph.D. candidate and a complete and utter asshole.

“You were way too good for him anyway,” Gansey promises around a big spoonful of ice cream and a strong urge to go mow the boy down with one of his father’s nicer cars.

*

6.

Gansey used to have a mild fear of heights, until Helen got her helicopter license and she took him up over their hometown and all its neighboring cities, higher and higher until they blended into one rolling greengreybrown ocean of life.

Then he had a severe fear of heights for about eight seconds when Helen gave him a sly grin and made the helicopter dive twenty feet to the tune of him screaming.

*

7.

She had never been so scared in her entire life, standing outside the ambulance, watching three paramedics load a still-breathing body covered in a sheet and a thousand angry stings into the back with their mother while she had to wait with their father holding her still by her shoulders.

Sometimes she still wakes up to the sound of hornets buzzing.

*

8.

The first thing Gansey did after Ronan taught him how to box was go home and teach Helen how to throw all of the same punches.

It seemed like a good idea until she got the hang of it very quickly and sucker-punched him in the nose, and then didn’t even have the good grace to hide her grin while she got him an ice pack.

*

9.

Helen likes Monmouth, but she doesn’t like going there because Gansey always leaves his dirty clothes all over the floor and the beer in the refrigerator is both of terrible quality and next to the toilet and the model of Henrietta takes up most of the space where she would sleep if Noah wasn’t mysteriously always out of town when she came to visit and there is no central air conditioning whatsoever and…

It’s not worth the energy to be annoyed, she supposes, as she dumps a laundry basket of Gansey’s boxers out of Monmouth’s second story window.

*

10.

“Will you plan my wedding for free when I get older, or will I have to hire you?” Gansey asks over a massive binder full of floral arrangements that mostly look exactly the same to him.

“Well, you’ll either end up marrying all the friends who already live with you, or you’ll end up marrying that king of yours, and I don’t think I’m qualified for either one,” Helen replies without ever looking up from her list of cakes.

*

11.

When Helen visits Ronan in the hospital, three days after the Incident, Gansey is asleep in a chair in the corner of Ronan’s room, Matthew is outside at the hospital cafe, and Declan is talking heatedly with someone on the phone as he paces back and forth in front of the hallway window.

Ronan opens his mouth to say something and she cuts him off with, “shut up, you idiot,” and hugs him tight and long enough that his arms finally settle loosely around her back too.

*

12.

When Helen graduates from high school, Gansey is twelve years old and doesn’t remember very much about it other than her arguing with their mother over shoes and getting quite a few checks in the mail.

When Helen graduates from college, Gansey is sixteen and hires a limo, throws the biggest, most exorbitant party he could possibly imagine, and carries Helen around on his shoulders for a solid twenty-five minutes while leading increasingly tipsy chants in her honor.

*

13.

The feeling of something moving in her bed jolts Helen awake and she’s tempted to kick at it until she recognizes the sleep-mussed mop of hair poking out of the blanket next to her.

“I had dreams,” Gansey says simply, and Helen nods, draws him to her, and doesn’t ask for any more clarification.

*

14.

Helen disapproves of the Pig.

Helen also, however, likes flooring the gas pedal of the Pig and shooting through the back roads of Henrietta, blasting one of Noah’s old cassette tapes and laughing with the windows rolled down, her hair whipping in Gansey’s face as he pleads with her not to ruin his gas mileage.

*

15.

In the weeks after Gansey’s first bad allergic reaction, Mrs. Gansey II buys a case of EpiPens and gives Helen a practice pen, saying, “Learn how to use this, darling, as soon as you can, please.”

The next morning, Helen has small bruises all up and down her thigh and two EpiPens tucked in her backpack, just in case.

*

16.

Helen, despite staring at, talking about, moving, buying, and eating cakes for a living, has almost no baking talent.

They find this out when they try to make a cake for their father’s birthday, and Gansey II has to put out his own oven with a fire extinguisher while Gansey and Helen stand in the corner, chastised and quietly but furiously arguing over whose fault it actually was.

*

17.

Helen loves flying at night, when the lights are on all around the city and Virginia seems electric and alive under her, blinking and flashing and throwing light up into the sky to meet her.

Gansey likes sitting at his window and watching the helicopter’s lights blinking like especially confused stars, threatening to fall to earth and then rising again.

*

18.

“What are you most scared of?” Gansey asks, twirling a loose thread on Helen’s pillowcase.

Helen frowns and thinks for a moment, then says, “Breaking all of mom’s glassware, probably.”

*

19.

When Helen and Gansey fight, it seems like the windows in the Gansey household shake from the yelling and every living thing runs off to curl away and hide from the vitriol they hurl at each other.

When Helen and Gansey  _really_  fight, it seems like half of Virginia is consumed in the most stifling silence that only a Gansey refusing to talk about their feelings can bring.

*

20.

One time, Helen called Gansey, very drunk and unusually cheerful, and, in the midst of an extensive Long Island Iced Tea-fueled ramble, she called him “Dick-chard” on speaker phone.

The nickname stuck around for months afterward.

*

21.

“The weather is terrible and the food is incredibly uninteresting, but Malory is looking after me just fine and I’ve been keeping plenty busy, so you don’t need to worry about me,” Gansey says over the phone at two in the morning, Greenwich Standard Time.

Helen shakes her head and sighs and says, “Oh, Dick, I always worry about you.”

*

22.

Helen takes Gansey’s friends for a joyride in the helicopter one day.

It’s all a lot of fun until Adam, previously paper white and sweating, goes green and vomits all over the passenger seats.

*

23.

Gansey feels the claws of his anxiety tearing his chest apart and his lungs don’t work and his blood is made of ice and his throat is being crushed and his skin is stinging all over and his vision is swimming and he can’t get enough air in to fight back the panic and the world is starting to fall apart and–

“Breathe,” Helen reminds him, rubbing his shoulders with firm hands, and Gansey’s next breath of air is the sweetest he’s ever tasted.

*

24.

 _Jane_  is a very nice, very pretty, very intelligent girl, and Helen cannot figure out what the hell she’s doing running around with Aglionby boys who reek of magic and gasoline and polished names.

 _Blue_  is a terrifyingly powerful girl that bends those very same Aglionby boys around her at will with a sarcastic comment and a smile and Helen hopes that she’ll stick around for a while.

*

25.

Helen drives up from school to watch Gansey captain his first ever race with the Aglionby Academy crew team.

They win by a landslide and Helen is all ready to be proud, but then Gansey splashes her with an oar on his victory lap and it takes a lot of willpower not to jump in after him and tip his boat over.

*

26.

Helen used to think that Gansey was in love with Glendower, but then Blue Sargent came into the picture and his veritable heart eyes over the old Welsh king were joined by heart eyes over the psychic’s daughter.

She hopes the three of them will be very happy together.

*

27.

Helen’s favorite movie is _Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain_ , in the original French without subtitles.

Helen’s second favorite movie is the  _Muppets Christmas Carol_.

*

28.

“What are you going to do if mom wins her election?” Helen asks on the phone one night as she paints her nails a subtle shade of purple.

“Oh, God, I don’t know,” Gansey replies, staring out the window of Monmouth and ignoring his homework on the desk next to him, “and I don’t really want to think about it.”

*

29.

Gansey thinks a lot about setting Helen on Adam’s father, or on Declan, or on any of the people who make fun of Blue at school.

Gansey also thinks a lot about how to pay bail without his parents noticing.

*

30.

Helen, being her mother’s child, doesn’t like to cry, and she especially doesn’t like anyone to see her crying.

Gansey, being Gansey, leaves chocolate and soup outside her door, because he knows this, but he can’t just let her suffer.

*

31.

Gansey knows about the two women Helen dated in college and the three others she kissed and the very first girl she had a crush on, back before he knew what a crush was; Helen knows about the boy in Gansey’s class running for student council that he adamantly never thinks about and the way he definitely does not steal glances in the crew team locker room and the foreign exchange student who whispered dirty French in his ear in the back of a classroom during math.

Gansey swears his silence and Helen promises to take those secrets to her grave if he just says the word.

*

32.

When Gansey was four years old, he put on a poorly taped cone hat made of construction paper and declared that he wanted to be a wizard when he grew up.

Thirteen years later, Helen thinks that he might have made good on that in the end.

*

33.

“Who’s that tall girl who lives with Blue who wears all the orange and bright colors all the time?” Helen asks over the phone one night.

“Absolutely not,” Gansey says, and then he hangs up, and then he throws his phone across the room for good measure.

*

34.

“Adam isn’t hard on the eyes either, do you know when he turns eighteen?” Helen asks over the phone a few nights later.

“Absolutely  _not_ ,” Gansey says, aghast, and he pitches his phone out the second story window of Monmouth.

*

35.

“You know what’s a little ridiculous?” Helen says as the two of them sit on the hood of their father’s Rolls Royce, watching guests trickle out of the Gansey house in twos and threes.

“I kind of miss Adam’s car.”

*

36.

Gansey has called Helen a number of terrible things in his seventeen years of life.

Gansey has also decked more than one man in the face for daring to do the same.

*

37.

A few weeks after the Adam incident, Helen stole their mother’s checkbook and wrote an actual joy check to Gansey, good for one intense moment of happiness, redeemable at any time.

Gansey has yet to cash it.

*

38.

Helen attends Niall Lynch’s funeral for Ronan, who loved his father, and for Gansey, who loves Ronan, and for Aurora Lynch, who was a lovely woman she met a handful of times and is strangely absent from the proceedings.

At the same time, Helen attends the old Ronan Lynch’s funeral, because she knows that, like Gansey, after this death, he will never be the same.

*

39.

"I'm thinking of registering as an Independent for the next election when I turn eighteen," Gansey says, sipping at an espresso.

"Oh my God, mom's going to  _kill you_."

*

40.

Gansey has spent more than half of his life listening to different boys make the same jokes over and over about his name.

But no one has made as many dick jokes over the years as Helen.

*

41.

Helen drew Gansey a temporary tattoo of a raven on his left shoulder when he left for Aglionby with a trunk of clothes and a duffle bag of journals and newspapers and old books.

She doesn’t know that Gansey later went out with Ronan and made it permanent.

*

42.

“You know, maybe you should take a break from this whole Glendower thing and just enjoy your last couple years of high school,” Helen suggests while she and Gansey are putting together miniature sandwiches for one of their mother’s parties.

“If I don’t do it,” Gansey says, cutting up tiny wedges of cheese that cost more than Adam’s scholarship, “then who will?”

*

43.

When Gansey is fourteen, Helen pulls him aside and says, “Look, I don’t care what mom says, if you’re going to be living on your own then you need to know how to use one of these.”

If there’s a sight in the world funnier than watching Richard Campbell Gansey III trying to unroll a condom over his own hand, she doesn’t know what it is.

*

44.

“I have to admit, I’ve always wanted to do this, so thank you for helping me live a dream,” Helen says.

Gansey winks at her, and then together they heave the hotel television set out the window and take off running into the hall, leaving a three thousand dollar check for repairs on the bed behind them.

*

45.

“What did you even do before Glendower?” she asks, handing him a hot glue gun so that he can reattach a model of a bank made out of a Cheerios box.

Gansey gives that some thought, and then says, “I don’t think there ever was a ‘before Glendower’.”

*

46.

When Helen was a child, she wanted to be president of the United States, just like all the other girls in her class.

When she got older, though, she gave up on it, because planning bursts of happiness was much better than planning miserable stability.

*

47.

In the worst, most backwards and terrible way, Helen is almost glad that Gansey still has screaming nightmares sometimes.

It means he's not quite as detached as everyone else in the world seems to think.

*

48.

Helen storms into the kitchen, grocery bags in hand, and demands, “Why did you tell me to come in here when there’s still so much to do?”

“You looked like you needed a break,” Gansey replies as he takes the bags from her hands and replaces them with a cup of tea before disappearing back into the fray.

*

49.

“How many stars do you think there are?” a six year old Gansey asks as they lie in the grass outside their house, staring up at the sky.

“I don’t know, maybe one day we’ll go up and count.”

*

50.

Gansey still calls sometimes when he has nightmares and Ronan is an asshole and Noah is oblivious and he doesn’t want to be alone.

Helen listens to him breathing on the other end of the line for a long time after he’s finally fallen back asleep.

*

 

 


End file.
